--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: x99lynx@...
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Friday, April 05, 2002 6:58 AM
> Subject: [tied] The Dravidian Salesman
>
>
> > I think you underestimate how much, say, a Dravidian cotton
farmer and family's well-being may have been tied to the
marketplace. And in that kind of situation, prestige should be the
last thing on their minds. The children's count in the cotton field
had better match the count given a week later to the buyer. That's
just good business. And there's an obvious advantage to using the
same words to count in the field as you use in the market.
>
> What I mean is, was it consistently the Dravidians who sold things
and the Indo-Aryans who bought them? The question is not rhetorical --
I simply don't know if the traditional occupations of the peoples of
India warrant such an idealised scenario. As an additional
complication, the pattern of replacement is not the same everywhere --
the South Dravidian languages and some of the South-Central ones
(e.g. Telugu) either have retained the inherited set or replace some
of the higher numerals only variably, while the remaining languages
have already replaced the 4-10 (or at least 8-10) series with Indo-
Aryan items. Anyway, if the vague notion of "prestige" is substituted
with something more concrete like the "economic dominance" of the
Indo-Aryan speakers (which would be the case if most of the moneyed
customers belonged to that linguistic group), I don't mind. I have
already attempted to relate the rate of borrowing to the proportion
of bilingual speakers among the borrowing speech community.
>
> Piotr
The latest buzzword used by some Indologists to explain the spread of
vedic Sanskrit into Dravidian/Munda/Language-X (one is not completely
sure of that even) speakers is Ehret's 'elite kit' and not economic
dominance. Of course 'Elite kit' comes close to prestige effect
In this scenario, it is not due to mere commercial transactions, but
the elite of the non-aryan speakers "going aryan" wholesale , not
just for language, but in a whole range of cultural, spiritual and
technological matters. Once the elite get aryanised -not just
linguistically-, it quickly spreads among the non-elite non-aryans.
Who were these aryans whom others were so eagar to imitate; it was
a 'lost tribe' from the wilds of Afghanistan who lost their way and
stayed on in India speaking RV sanskrit
There are lots of holes in this theory and there are many historical
counter-examples.